Challenges for a company that sells online services
Previously I talked about some of the challenges experienced by organizations who sell physical products. In this day and age, online services are also pretty common products that consumers can pay money for. However, organizations that provide these kinds of online services also have their unique set of challenges when delivering these kinds of products.
Reliance on IT infrastructure that you don’t have full control on
Whether your online service runs via the internet or within a specific IT infrastructure of your client or customer, you as an organization need to be aware of the risks involved when running your online services in an infrastructure that is not fully under your control. In modern times, connectivity uptime rates provided by third-party hosting providers are as high as 99.9%. At the same time, it is imperative that your underlying software can handle downtime. However, there still might be times that parts of the infrastructure go down extensively and hurt your business.
Increased Priority in Updates on Security Vulnerabilities
Due to increasing amount of libraries used in software applications nowadays and the added complexities within software, it is essential to keep the technology stacks used for your online service up to date with the latest security patches and updates. This can put a strain in your innovation and feature rollout speed. Because new features might require extra security testing. Keeping up with security patches is not always straight forward as you might actually need to do manual investigation to find out what kinds of updates are necessary, and at the same time, make sure they are compatible with your software application. Which can take quite some time and effort.
Added complexity in software to support diversity of customer’s systems
If your online services are provided via an internet browser, chances are that you as an organization would need to support the browser most commonly used by your customer. If you have many customers it can also be the case that you would have to make sure that your online service software supports all browsers used by your customers. Some browsers share the same underlying browser technology. Others, especially outdated ones require you to create a completely separate implementation of your online service software so that it can run in that specific browser, which creates a large software development overhead to get done, and maintain.
So in conclusion, selling online service products requires you to rely on IT infrastructures that is not fully in your control, updates on security patches become top priority and added complexity is created due to having to support the software systems used by your customers.